Clockwork Symphony

I can't quite shake the feelings that led to last night's post.

When did it get to this point? When did routine become so comfortable, so preferable, that its absence becomes a distraction, an irritating disturbance. It wasn't supposed to be this way. I'm the goddamn rebel. I'm the filthy iconoclast (well, not really filthy, the morning shower is very important to me). I'd use the word maverick, if not for the fact that John McCain took that word and killed it during his presidential bid. Bit of a shame, really... I always liked that word.

It's a bad joke that I think that I was supposed to be different. Everybody thinks that. It was my choice, it is my choice and I make it every day, every time I turn left at the underpass (towards Tucson) instead of right (towards Phoenix, and perhaps adventure?!)

And every day, I wake up and wonder what changed, at what point did this become the preferable choice? When did bills start to matter? Didn't used to, you know. Used to be this thing, where it was like, "oh, shit, need power to run the Xbox, man." Now I have a ledger. Well, it's really just a piece of graph paper, but it's next to my desk in an accordion folder with files for all the different expenses.

What weirds me the fuck out is that I don't even mind that this is who I am now. And I feel like it should, I feel like it can't be that I'm done already with having long hair and that peachfuzz stubble too unkempt to be called a beard... unless, of course, the homeless look is what's in these days. Is that over already? And then I realize that those days are years in the past, at a point in my life where I was living on my own for the first time and my idea of being responsible then was showing up at my job as a counter jockey at a video game store.

This might be growing up, not in the "fuck yeah, I can buy my own booze now" sense, but in the actual perceptible sense that I'm not the same person that I was a year ago. I feel different, as I'm sure I have every time a new personal milestone was reached, except that now, for once, I don't have quite so much trivial bullshit occupying my thoughts that I didn't notice.

Well, that's a dubious claim, at best. There's still plenty of trivial bullshit and immaturity in here. Probably as much as there always was, except maybe now I don't let it have quite so complete a hold over my life. The idea of going to bed before 3 AM because I have class the next doesn't quite seem so much an anathema as it used to.

The weird thing about this sort of reflection, which has become a recurring thought as I do this, is that there exists a profound discrepancy in what I write about each time I sit down to do this thing. Because the reality is that we're all fluid, chaotic beings, despite our routines, despite our schedules, and our sense of self is forever colored by the mood, the moment, the manipulation that is the present reality. Today, I'm feeling mature, strangely lucid, caught up in the marvel of the recognition that I'm not a kid any more. Tomorrow, it will be entropy incarnate, a sense of despair that thoughts and actions are lost in the empty noise that is the void of a meaningless reality. Or whatever. The point is that I'm a little bit different each time I write something here, and I think you can see that, if you go back and look from post to post.

I don't pretend to assume that this makes me different in any way; we all change according to the day and I think the only difference is that in my case, you have these little shards of each of those realities spread out in one neat little place and while for me, twelve hours have passed between what I'm writing now and what I wrote last night, for you, there's only a difference of a few sentences and, at most, mere minutes. Depends on how fast of a reader you are.

I should go write some philosophy. Got a paper due.